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BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

Polish ‘vampire’ burials weren’t just for outsiders

Not getting up again

(Image: Amy Scott)

HOW do you spot the undead? In 17th- and 18th-century Poland, special burial rites were meant to keep vampires from rising from their graves. Now a team has been trying to figure out why these corpses were singled out as supernatural suspects.

Lesley Gregoricka at the University of South Alabama and her colleagues looked at six burials excavated in recent years in Drawsko County, Poland. Each body was staked down with sickles (pictured) or had a stone placed in or under its jaw – documented anti-vampire measures. By examining the ratios of different isotopes in the tooth enamel, the team determined where these corpses came from (PLoS One, DOI&colon; 10.1371/journal.pone.0113564).

“We were surprised to learn that the Drawsko ‘vampires’ were local to the area,” says Gregoricka. “We expected that these individuals were targeted for deviant burial because of their status as outsiders to the community.”

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Instead, the team suggests the six suspects may have been victims of the cholera epidemics that hit Eastern Europe in the 17th century. Being the first local to die from a disease outbreak could be another reason to mark someone as a vampire risk, they say. “The spread of diseases like cholera was very poorly understood in the 17th century,” says Gregoricka. “So people turned to the supernatural to make sense of death and misfortune.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Polish ‘Vampire’ burials weren’t just for outsiders”